Today the armed forces are no longer representative of the people they serve. More and more, enlisted [men and women] as well as officers are beginning to feel that they are special, better than the society they serve. This is not healthy in an armed force serving a democracy.
I share deeply the concern that we are living through a period when the gap between the American people and their military is getting wider.
I do not believe the people who wear the uniform of the United States are disconnected from the rest of American society or are in danger of becoming isolated.
One of the most significant ethical issues facing the United States today is the current state of civil-military relations in this country. Why should the relationship between the military and society be viewed as a matter of ethical concern?
In the first place, the military's relations to civilian authorities and to society lies at the very heart of what democracy is all about. Harry Truman observed that "man has the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and justice." The eminent German sociologist Max Weber informed us that the state is defined by the government's monopoly of the legitimate possession and use of force. The military is the principal embodiment of state-centered and state-controlled violence. Thus, in a form of government where the people are supposed to rule, civilian supremacy over the military is essential—it is an ethical imperative. Where this relationship fails or falters, the very end of government stands in jeopardy.
Second, the three parties to the civil-military relationship—the military, its civilian masters, and the people themselves—are linked to one another by social contract. "The first principle of a civilized state," Walter Lippman observed, "is that power is legitimate only when it is under contract." A social contract is a tacit, mutually binding set of expectations, obligations, and rights. Because it depends on the ability—and the willingness—of the parties involved to live up to their end of the unwritten bargain, it is an ethical compact in every sense.
What Society Expects of the Military
The most obvious expectation of the military by society is operational competence—the ability of the military to fulfill its mission by accomplishing all assigned tasks. Should we judge or measure operational competence in terms of strategic effectiveness or mere military effectiveness? The importance of this question lies in the military's institutional preference—and its frequent insistence—that it be given only purely "military" tasks to perform, and that it be judged narrowly in terms of its ability to accomplish such presumably clear-cut tasks.
In another sense, the importance of this question lies in the realization that it is possible to be militarily effective without being strategically effective. In fact, experience demonstrates that military effectiveness, especially in the media age, can sometimes actually be strategically detrimental. A military, for example, that is structured, equipped, trained, and psychologically prepared to wage war for the purpose of securing peace—but whose presence feeds the insecurity and militarization of others—is strategically dysfunctional. Similarly, a military prepared only for the conduct of conventional war that can't be used at all when confronted by forms of conflict unlike traditional war is strategically useless. By extension, we might say that such a military, which is largely blind to a future waiting to be shaped, is an ethically debased instrument of state.
Is this what we must accept as the price of maintaining a permanent military establishment? Hardly. In attempting to measure up to expectations, the military should ask whether its true purpose is to prepare for and wage war, to prevent war, to provide for the common defense, to secure and preserve peace, or something else more ambiguously defined. These are fundamentally different aims, each calling for a qualitatively different force-in-arms to achieve them. Ours is a distinctly warmaking military. Therefore, the military must question the deeply ingrained belief that the best, if not only, way to secure peace is to prepare for war. For too long we have uncritically accepted this classical shibboleth as received truth. The result has been the opposite of the permanent universal peace we want. To decline to even question such "truth" is itself ethically irresponsible.
Civilians also expect sound advice from the military—rendering the best possible professional judgement to the elected and appointed civilian authorities who are accountable for ensuring the country's security. Should this advice be military or strategic? Should the military be in the business of providing essentially unbounded strategic counsel on matters related to national aims and justifications, or should it restrict itself to more narrowly circumscribed military matters?
The answer has much to do with the fact that the politicians who enter office today are increasingly devoid not only of military experience and understanding but of strategic understanding as well. They frequently cannot answer even the "little" questions of what a military is for, much less the "bigger" questions of what a military should be for and to what effect. Such willful ignorance logically might be expected to lead to the disuse, misuse, or abuse of the military. Yet the Clinton administration and current Congress have shown that the result may well be the overindulgence of the military—evidenced by the continued profligacy of defense spending, as well as a cavalier overuse of the armed forces for nonstrategic, inappropriate, and even illegitimate reasons of political expediency and convenience.
Is it incumbent upon the military to fill this crucial intellectual void, especially if it profits from the ignorance of its overseers? Perhaps—provided the military is up to the task. Conventional wisdom has it that strategy and strategic thinking are an organic part of the military's intellectual domain. Is there some intellectual threshold, however, for those who have grown up professionally in a hierarchical institution governed by an ethos of obedience to authority, who have been forced to think technically and tactically, and who prize action over reflection?
A more commonly expressed fear is that permitting the military to be too centrally involved in determining national aims and policies is tantamount to politicizing the military, militarizing society, and creating the equivalent of a garrison state. Anyone even remotely aware of how thoroughly any propensity for the military overthrow of government has been socialized out of the U.S. officer corps will be quick to see that this is an unfounded fear. Were it otherwise, we might expect at least an occasional senior officer resignation over matters of principled disagreement with civilian authorities. And if we had a more strategically oriented military, the perceived threat would be even less worrisome.
Civilians also expect the military to be politically neutral—to remain above the unseemly expediency, favoritism, and self-interested dealmaking of low, partisan politics. Does that mean staying out of the high politics of statecraft as well? Not at all. Let us first recognize the impossibility of staying out of politics altogether. Even the public professions like the military and foreign service that most sanctimoniously trumpet their aversion to and distance from all things political thrive on the cut-throat bureaucratic politics of institutional natural selection. As Theodore White observed, "Politics in America is the binding secular religion." It defines who we are as a people; it energizes us; it is, more than we care to admit, our spiritual sustenance. More important, there is a qualitative difference of purpose between low and high politics. This distinction was probably best put by the career diplomat, Sir Humphrey Appleby, in the former BBC televisions series, Yes, Prime Minister. "Diplomacy," he said, "is about surviving until the next century; politics is about surviving until Friday."
From Washington through Eisenhower and Marshall, Americans have long revered the soldier-statesmen in our midst—uniformed professionals endowed not only with the expertise and virtues of their calling, but with the requisite political sophistication to appreciate the larger ramifications of their actions and to participate as an intellectual equal in the highest policy councils. Given the convergence that has occurred between the strategic and tactical realms of statecraft—where the seemingly most insignificant incident in the remotest corner of the globe can have almost instantaneous strategic reverberations at many spatial and temporal removes from its point of occurrence—the need for diplomats in khaki is every bit as great as that for diplomats in pinstripes.
No longer do we have "great wars" that provide a natural proving ground for the emergence of soldier-statesmen. Instead, we have desultory minor wars, whose frequency, persistence, and cumulative effects call for even greater men and women. What we now need, therefore, is to nurture a new breed of statesmen-soldiers—individuals schooled in the diplomatic arts, familiar with foreign cultures, practiced in the principles of statecraft, and able to integrate such know-how with a first-hand understanding of military culture, capabilities, and applications.
Finally, civilians expect the military to be socially responsible—to be an institution that not only gets the job done operationally, but that does so in a manner that contributes to civil society. Washington put things in proper perspective in saying, "When we assumed the soldier, we did not lay aside the citizen." In this country, none among us is a purely professional soldier. Those in uniform should be professional citizen-soldiers whose first allegiance must be to the society they represent and serve, not to the institution to which they belong. When the military becomes alienated from society; when its members talk of moral superiority but fail, in incident after incident, to walk the walk; when they evince a civil illiteracy no less pronounced and troubling than the military illiteracy they decry in their civilian political masters, the stage is set for a crisis in civil-military relations.
A Civil-Military Crisis?
Do we have such a crisis today? There are two schools of thought on the subject, now joined in lively debate. The most forceful arguments that there is a crisis have come from journalists Thomas Ricks, long of The Wall Street Journal and now with The Washington Post, and James Kitfield of National Journal. Ricks has contended that the military is becoming increasingly politicized and conservative, that there has been a disturbing decline in military professionalism, and that there is a widening gap between the military and society. He quotes retired Admiral Stanley Arthur, who commanded U.S. naval forces during the 1991 Persian Gulf War: "Today the armed forces are no longer representative of the people they serve. More and more, enlisted [men and women] as well as officers are beginning to feel that they are special, better than the society they serve. This is not healthy in an armed force serving a democracy."
Kitfield has echoed this position in referring to the "nearly unbridgeable cultural divide" between this nation's military and civilian leaders. He writes: "By nearly every measurement—recruitment, retention, equipment modernization, morale, readiness to fight—the all-volunteer force is in trouble. . . . and those troubles can best be traced to the increasingly uneasy intersection of the military and mainstream American society." He quotes former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), General John Shalikashvili, who has said: "I share deeply the concern that we are living through a period when the gap between the American people and their military is getting wider."
On the other side of the argument, current JCS Chairman, General Henry Shelton, recently stated: "There is a bond—a mutual respect—between our citizens and the military that few other nations can match. There has been a great deal written recently about the military becoming isolated from society. While I understand the concerns, I do not believe the people who wear the uniform of the United States are disconnected from the rest of American society or are in danger of becoming isolated."
Similarly, John Hillen, an appointee to the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, takes the position that "the so-called gap between American society and its military. . . . has been misidentified and highly oversold. No doubt, the values, beliefs, and patterns of behavior that define the culture of military organizations are different from the culture of society in general. But I believe that most of America appreciates that difference, recognizing that the unique values and attributes of military culture are an occupational necessity for an institution tasked with winning under the unnatural stress of war."
There obviously are sound, defensible, well-reasoned arguments on both sides of this debate. We should not reject out of hand the proposition that there is a gap between the military and society. It could be that there is a crisis that demands our attention, but we just have not been perceptive enough to recognize it for what it is. There is no crisis in the conventional sense of a sudden occurrence of potentially catastrophic proportions that creates public alarm. It is more like a barely noticed lymphoma that feeds on itself and destroys silently from within.
With these characteristics, we should accept the alleged gap as something to be taken seriously, monitored, and managed. Hillen's comments in this regard offer room for discussion:
This sort of gap needs to be managed, but it does not have to be closed. Eliminating the gap might solve the "problem" that the military does not look like society, but it might create a greater one—that the military will look too much like society. . . . If [the military] goes too far in pleasing the social mores of contemporary society, it may lose the culture needed for success in war. If it goes too rigidly in a purely martial direction, it could create a praetorian force contemptuous of the society it protects with military disobedience toward civilian superiors being the first sign of trouble. (October 1998 Proceedings, pp. 2-5.)
This statement is problematic for three reasons. First, it suggests that there are clearly identifiable martial virtues that not only exist but are eternal in their content and relevance. Second, it alludes to a form of military disobedience that, if it occurred, would be flagrantly obvious, while ignoring the many subtle forms of disobedience that are so much a part of everyday bureaucratic politics. Third, the statement implicitly reflects a hypocritical hubris of many in uniform today, who consider themselves occupants of a moral high ground that overlooks an increasingly indolent, decadent, and even depraved society. For these self-anointed moral supremacists, the idea that there is a gap in values that is worth preserving has great appeal. This is a case worth making if the values to which the military subscribes are discipline, dedication, loyalty, propriety, and honor. But when those values become distorted—as they frequently do—into parochialism, resistance to change, insularity, workaholism, careerism, and aggressive intolerance and prejudice, then we have a military that not only is no better than society, but worse.
Needed: Strategic Leadership
Managing this gap, if in fact it exists, is a task for strategic leadership. Leadership is simply about exercising power over others—getting them to defer or go along with one's wishes. In contrast to coercive uses of power, leadership involves inspiring others to follow willingly. Such willingness derives from respect, which itself comes from setting an example of principled character and consistency. If we want to invest leadership with such purity of meaning, we could say that ethical leadership is redundant, while unethical leadership is a contradiction in terms. There are managers, administrators, executives, and commanders. But there are no unethical leaders.
Strategic leadership is distinctive in that it is a uniquely intellectual enterprise. "Reason and judgement," said the Roman historian Tacitus, "are the qualities of a leader." They certainly are the qualities of a strategic leader. Strategic leadership is not about position, nor is it about those intangibles that otherwise can invest one with authority, such as charisma, presence, or eloquence. It is very much about vision, that rare capacity that sets the strategic leader apart from his peers.
"Vision," said Jonathan Swift, "is the art of seeing things invisible." But vision involves more than just the ability to see what others can't. It is about more than just discernment or imagination. It is every bit as much about courage and initiative—a willingness to go out on a limb or to step outside the established norms, and to do so without prodding when it is not the accepted thing to do.
If the strategic leaders among us fail to manage whatever gap may have developed between the military and society, the greatest danger that lies ahead of the United States is that the military will become more estranged and progressively less responsive to the broader needs and aims of the country. The institution, complacent in the misplaced belief that the future necessarily must be a continuation of the past, will fulfill its own prophecy and flounder in self-induced entropy. Its members, themselves morally superior to the rest of society and technically superior to civilian decision makers who do not understand them, will equate the national interest with the self-interest of the institution. The flip side of this is that the military's civilian overseers, increasingly devoid of military experience and understanding, will defer unquestioningly to military judgment, thus turning the democratic ideal of civilian supremacy into a political reality of civilian subjugation and strategic incapacitation.
The greatest challenge before us as Americans will be to demand an institutional environment within our military that nurtures strategic thinking, responsible dissent, and the development of strategic leaders. For its part, the military needs nothing more to galvanize it in this regard than those most painful words about the military mind that H.G. Wells wrote in Outline of History: "The professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative mind; no man of high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such a calling." If there is truth to this indictment, the military's overriding aim should be to eradicate the condition. If it is false, the aim should be to set the record straight. Ethically and strategically, there is no alternative in the heightened ambiguity, turbulence, and danger of the post-Cold War world.
Mr. Foster is a professor at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, National Defense University, Washington, DC, where he previously served as George C. Marshall Professor.